The WHY of Gnip: Stop Building What Everyone Else is Building

I have a tendency to ramble. Why use a sentence when a paragraph will suffice, right? As a result, I limit myself to 100 word posts on my sporadically updated personal blog. I’ll follow suit here, with only occasional excursions into longer territory. This is one such post.

I’ll try not to ramble too much…

Data portability, the ability to create content on one web site and derive value from it on other sites and applications, has become one of the defining characteristics of what is commonly referred to as “Web 2.0″. An emerging class of services are taking advantage of this data to create entirely new products, including social aggregators (Plaxo Pulse, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed), social search (Lijit, Delver) and communications dashboards (Fuser, Orgoo, Digsby). Each of these services is predicated on the belief that user-generated content is the raw material upon which great companies can be built.

Data portability, via RSS or ATOM or XMPP or open APIs is neither difficult nor complex. These are known problems with straightforward solutions and open standards. But each connection between two services (e.g. MyBlogLog and Flickr or Plaxo and Digg) is a custom integration, requiring at least one of the parties to set up a custom channel to access, process and ultimately make use of the transferred data. As companies seek to create robust solutions built upon dozens or even hundreds of data feeds, engineers face an exponentially growing problem of building and maintaining these custom communication channels. Simply put, data portability is a big hassle.

Crucially, data portability has become the cost of entry for these services. It is not enough for a social aggregator to claim the most sources or a social search company the biggest pool of data. The leaders in this space are focused on filtering and presenting data in useful ways; out of a billion pieces of data, they seek to connect you with the appropriate information at the appropriate time. All of the work building and maintaining back-end data portability services comes at the cost of building better front-end features that draw and satisfy users.

That’s where Gnip comes in. We’re dedicated to making data portability suck less, by reducing the effort required to collect and manage the data upon which these awesome new services are being created. Gnip aims to simplify the process of aggregating, standardizing and maintaining large pools of data, ultimately making he process as simple as uploading a list of your users.

Our first service is a solution to a key problem facing data portability implementations (Jud will give you the details in just a moment). We at Gnip believe in direct solutions to painful problems, and as a result, our first service isn’t fancy. But it’s quick to integrate, it scales like a monster and it uses a variety of web standards; we believe we’ve solved this particular problem pretty well. Over the coming months we’ll roll out additional direct solutions to painful problems, and before long we’ll have a bona fide platform for pushing data around the web.

We’re incredibly excited by the bounty that Web 2.0 has created. We are living with an embarrassment of riches in terms of shared information and experiences. But it’s overwhelming. I personally believe that Web 3.0 will herald a return to the individual — story, picture, friend, experience — because in aggregate, that which has great meaning often becomes meaningless. So it’s up to these awesome new services to take the Web 2.0 bounty and find for each of us those few things that will fundamentally enhance our lives. To give us something meaningful.

I hope that we at Gnip can build a foundation that enables these awesome new services to focus all of their attention on making great things. We’ll happily lay plumbing, mix concrete and smelt tin to see that happen.